2 10 1 HOW MEMORY WORKS God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December -J.M. Barrie 1860-1937 Scottish novelist and creator of Peter Pan Let's say I ask you to remember your last birthday I bet a picture is forming in your mind Perhaps you see yourself surrounded by friends and family opening gifts Do you hear your friends singing Happy Birthday Can you almost taste your chocolate cake Or maybe you are remembering remembering the feeling of your grandfather holding you close as he hugs you or the sulfury smell when you blow out the candles and make a wish Memories have a way of popping up in milliseconds That's superquick considering that a millisecond is one thousandth of a second о
3 How Memory Works WARNING WHAT COMES NEXT IS PRETTY TECHNICAL What exactly is going on inside your brain when you remember remember The answer is a lot And we don't understand all of it Although scientists have spent years investigating how the human brain makes memories they still have many unanswered questions Here's what they've figured out so far Memory is the result of the activity of neural circuits in our brains Now you must be wondering what neural circuits are They're groups of neurons connected by synapses that carry out specific functions Neurons send information to different parts of the brain using electrical impulses and chemical signals As for synapses they're pockets of space between two cells We also know there are three steps to remembering encoding storing and retrieval ENCODING STORING RETRIEVAL
4 The brain takes in information from each of the five senses sight smell hearing touch and taste FRANKRAMSPOTT SHUTTERSTOCK.COM ENCODING Encoding happens when we learn something or when information information comes to us through the five senses That's why I mentioned seeing your birthday party hearing your friends sing tasting cake feeling your grandfather's hug and smelling the sulfury smell as you blew out the candles Our senses allow us to perceive the world Without them we wouldn't have anything to remember A part of the brain called the hippocampus plays an important role in forming new memories Located deep inside the brain the hippocampus is shaped like a seahorse Think of the hippocampus as a train station Memories don't hang out there for long Instead they get processed and sent off to be stored in the parts of the brain responsible for long term memory
How Memory Works If a person's hippocampus is damaged it is more difficult difficult to form new memories We know for example that Alzheimer's disease affects the hippocampus You have probably probably heard of Alzheimer's a brain disorder that causes the brain to shrink and brain cells to die leading to the deterioration deterioration of memory and thinking skills Alzheimer's disease mostly affects older adults Hippo Who If you're like me you like saying the word hippocampus Maybe because it starts off like the word hippopotamus It is believed that back in 1587 a Roman surgeon named Julius Caesar Arantius was the first to discover and describe this part of the brain Noting its resemblance to a seahorse Arantius called it the hippocampus But he wasn't the one who came up with the word In Greek and Roman mythology the god of the sea who is called Poseidon in Greek mythology and Neptune in the Roman drives a chariot drawn by creatures called hippocampi The top of these creatures bodies looks like a horse while the bottom is like a fish In other words they resemble seahorses More recently in 2019 a tiny moon orbiting the planet Neptune about three billion miles from Earth was named Hippocamp 5
